Getting safe water on Long Treks

Water is very essential during trekking, and neglecting that can cause serious dehydration. For short treks, you can carry most of the water you need for the entire journey in bottles. But for extended treks, this becomes more difficult, especially if camping or cooking is involved. Water is heavy, since a litre of it weighs a kilogram, it quickly overwhelms the carrier.

Water from natural sources like streams or by melting snow can be used for drinking and cooking purposes, however a few precautions are mandatory, to prevent unwanted diseases from drinking contaminated water.

The most effective of all these is to boil the water. The water need not actually boil for an extended period, just getting it to boil should suffice. This will render the water safe to drink. But this is also a complicated and time consuming procedure.

The other method is to buy Iodine beforehand at your local medical store. For a recent 3 day trek I bought BetaDine(R) iodine bottle for about Rs 113 at the local medical store. You can buy Tincture of Iodine also, but it has less concentration. It was a normal 100ml bottle, and can potentially clean hundreds of liters of water. Just add 8 drops of it to a liter of clear water, and wait for 30 mins for the iodine to kill most of the microorganisms. Iodine is not poisonous in higher doses, so you can safely increase the dosage without any side-effects. double the dosage, if you see visible contamination or if you want quicker response time. After 30 mins, there will be a slight after-taste to water due to iodine. I personally did not mind the taste, but for those of you who do, you can carry Vitamin C tablets. You must add them AFTER the 30 mins, otherwise iodine will not be effective (since the Vitamin C tablets convert iodine to iodide, removing the taste). I would suggest using iodine in normal water once before the trek to know clearly how you feel about the taste of it, and see if you need Vitamin C or not.

WARNING: Do NOT EXPOSE IODINE TO SUNLIGHT! It renders it ineffective!

Iodine tablets are also available I suppose, although I havent tried them.

I also suggest having a backup scheme to purify water, to prevent any unexpected incidents like the bottle accidentally getting exposed to sunlight or breaking.

Check out this link for more details on other water purification methods. Remember, by not carrying a lot of bottles, you are also not polluting the environment with plastic!

Trekking Essentials

Trying to go for a trek in the wilderness? Here is a list of the essentials you need to carry. Most of them will seem like overkill, but if an emergency happens you will be happy you have them! The list is incomplete, and I will be adding stuff regularly as I figure it out.

Navigational Aids:

1. Detailed and marked Map
2. Compass (optionally supplemented with a GPS receiver)
3. Cell Phone

Survival Aids:

1. Water proof Matches/Lighter with candles for easier starting
2. Flashlight
3. Knife
4. Rope
5. Cap/Hat
6. Water Purification tablets
7. Old News papers for Fire
8. Energy Bars
9. Jerkin/rain wear (against rain and cold)
10. Whistle (for communication if lost)
11. Local Enforcement official contact and details
12. Extra batteries (for flash light or camera)

Health Aids:
1. First aid kit
2. Sprain Band & Gauze
3. Sunglasses and sunscreen
4. Mosquito/Insect repellent
5. Disinfectant (For handwash)
6. Protection against Leeches

Comfort
1. Extra food and water containers
2. Extra clothes
3. Rain wear
4. Extra socks
5. Tissue paper
6. Wet Tissues

Miscelleneous/Entertainment:
1. Camera
2. Extra clothes

Treks with camping:
1. Tents
2. Sleeping bags/blankets
3. Campfire starting materials

Treks with substantial climbing:
1. Gloves
2. Shoes with proper grip
3. Bags with tight straps
4. tight clothing
5. Ropes
6. Pick axe

Trip to Nandi Hills

After a long vacation-less November, it was time for action again, and this time we decided to go visit Coorg near Bangalore during the weekend of Dec 6-7. However since the number of people got reduced to my friend - MJ, his wife - Sudha and myself, We had no option but to cancel the planned 2 day coorg trip and then instead planned on visiting Nandi Hills about 70 km from bangalore.

Since we felt a cab for 3 people was an overkill, we took my friend AJ's Pulsar 180, and Phani's Bajaj Discover to visit Nandi hills. We started at 1PM in the afternoon after having lunch at Swagruha near our friend's house. After travelling for 4 km on the Outer Ring Road, I was stopped by two cops. The Pulsar 180 is a Tamil Nadu registration vehicle, and my friend never actually paid the Karnataka state tax for it. So not having any kind of insurance/pollution certificate or tax reciept, he asked for a Rs 800 fine... or Rs 200 bribe :)). I paid the bribe and he warned me about more cops checking vehicles near the Hebbal flyover. I took heed to his warning and closely followed a lorry, and missed the bunch of cops who were stopping vehicles at the Hebbal Flyover.

Nandi hills is located about 40 km away from the newly constructed Bangalore International Airport (BIAL), and hence the road was a 6 lane one with a 80KMPH speed limit. The P180 was rearing to go and I cruised along, but not forgetting to check out for cops at the same time. We reached Nandi hills at 3:30 PM.

The place was extremely beautiful, although there were no clouds. We had a complete view of the place around. Nandi hills was actually a fort belonging to Tipu Sultan at one time. The rock formation was awesome, and we had a walk all around the place and took a ton of pics. We also took our trademark "in-the-air" pics, where we jump, and use a multi snap capture camera to take a series of photographs spaced about 300 ms from each other. The monkeys on the hill were a serious menace, with one trying to snatch a chips packet directly from my hand. and it would not scare at all.

We started back at 5:30PM from Nandi Hills, and it was almost 8:00 PM by the time I reached my friend's house, without any further brushes with the cops :)

How people feel about themselves...

In a standard departure from my normal posts about vacations/economics/linux, I have started writing about some philosophical insights too which struck me as so true... :)

I have found the weather man movie very insightful... and I liked one quote the best of all... I have modified it a bit, to make it more relevant... It never amazes me how much of this is true about how people feel....

"When we are young, we picture ourselves having all these qualities, strong positive qualities that people could pick up on from across the room. But as time passes, few ever become any qualities that we actually have. And all the possibilities we face and the sorts of people we could be, all of them get reduced every year to fewer and fewer. Until finally they get reduced to one, to who you are. And that's who you are!"

So learn to live with yourself, stop pushing yourself too hard and be happy!

Overcomming blurred images in firefox

While using firefox, I recently noticed that most of the images are blurred and/or having artifacts all over. Initially I could not understand why this was happening even with new tabs. But it looks like when you zoom in, in firefox (using Ctrl +/- or the mouse wheel), it zooms images too. Also firefox "remembers" the zoom settings in some way, so that it applies for new tabs too. This is counter productive for me, since the main reason I zoom in is to read the text better, not for images.

So for those of you who want to disable this image zooming feature of firefox, go to View -> Zoom -> Zoom Text Only.

Its a trivial tip, but it changed my browsing experience for the better!

Waynad - Trip into God's Own Country

I heard a lot about Kerala being a very scenic place to visit, but could never visit it. So, last week, when my friend AJ who stays in Bangalore and is the cornerstone of all of my bangalore based trips like Bandipur, Mudigere, Shivanasamudram etc, mentioned he will be moving out of bangalore shortly, We decided to have one more trip. After throwing around a lot of names, Waynad stuck.

Located around 300KM from Bangalore in Kerala, Waynad is a popular and scenic hill station. So three of us - vamsi, praveen and myself - from Hyderabad booked tatkal tickets to bangalore. The train arrived late by two hours on Saturday morning at 8:30AM. We joined AJ and Balaji waiting in a Qualis, and started off to Waynad. After paying an RTO toll of Rs 600 at the Kerala-Karnataka border - which surprised us completely, we reached our Hotel in Kalpetta at 4:15. We then immediately left for the scenic Pookode Lake. Since we arrived there at 4:55, and boating in the lake closes at 5:00, we could not get a row boat ourselves, but had a tourism employee take us around the lake.


The employee, over chitchat, revealed that there would be treks to a nearby mountain peak daily, and we were tempted to cancel the next day plans completely and go for the trek. But he warned us that there would be leeches, but we did not care too much for them - how wrong we were! After getting off the boat, we roamed around the lake, and at one point my friend balaji and vamsi waded into a patch of water which was overflowing onto the path. Rest of us decided against it, and instead turned back. We went to the canteen and saw a group of people trying to get a leech off a guys leg using a pair of matches... Alarmed we immediately checked our own legs, and sure enough we found two leeches on Balaji's feet. It had sucked a decent amount of blood, and after removing them the blood would not clot, due to some anti-coagulant that the leech releases.

We rushed to the hotel room, and thoroughly cleaned ourselves, and vamsi who was wearing shoes, found two leeches on his sock, but which, luckily, could not penetrate the skin. After this rude jerk, we decided that tomorrow's trek was a lost cause. We then had a beer followed by dinner, and played cards until 12:30AM and then went to bed.

Next day morning at 8:30AM we visited the nearby Banasura Sagar Dam, and then went on a speed boat ride around it. Then we went to a supposedly scenic view point, but it was covered in complete clouds and had a visibility range only a couple of meters - leaving us staring into the whiteness. Finding nothing interesting in the vast whiteness, we started off to Soochipara waterfalls.

After reaching the place, we had to climb down a lot of steps to reach the base of the water fall. It was a very picturesque scene, and the water fall was in full force due to the recent monsoon. It is basically a 3 stage waterfall. After playing around on the rocks for some time, we then took a different set of steps to reach the 2nd stage of the water fall. We could not get close to it, but it was breathtaking. Later we went to another path to a view point. It was almost 4:30 PM by the time we reached the parking lot again. We decided we did not have time to visit the Edakkal caves which close at 5PM.

After buying a couple of souvenirs, We then started back to the hotel and freshened up. Later at around 7PM we started the long journey back to Bangalore. On the way back our Qualis hit a big bump in the road, and one of the tyre's rim got bent, and started hitting the disk brake. So we had to replace the tyre and were back on our way. It was almost 2PM by the time we reached bangalore.

Overall it was a very nice trip, with a lot of interesting experiences. I am looking forward to visit the rest of Kerala some time soon.

Irritating defaults in Linux Applications

If there is one thing that Linux/Unix applications are famous for, other than being open source - it is the irritating defaults they set. And just when you figured out how to disable the most irritating ones, you upgrade to a newer version, and they flood you with even more irritating defaults.

Vim takes the prize in this behavior. Every time I upgrade my Fedora, I get a new version of vim, and while I stopped finding any actual improvements between the vim I used 7 years ago and now, the new set of irritating defaults gets me. After upgrading to Fedora 9, with Vim 7.1, this struck me again.

While writing a piece of C code, the program keeps highlighting matching braces, whenever my cursor passes over them. This is mightly irritating, and I could not think of one good reason for making this the default behavior. I am a hardcore programmer and I know where the F*** match for that brace is!!! And the worst part was figuring out what the offending setting was. I tried googling for it, but it was difficult, since the normal terms like "brace", "bracket", "highlight", "show brace", "show match" did not turn up any results about the offending behavior.

Then it struck me that I was searching with the wrong terms, and put in "vim irritating brace" into google and presto! there were tons of forums where people like me were bitching about that behavior. The answer to turn off the feature is to add this to your .vimrc file

let loaded_matchparen=1

Long way to go... before ppl stop messing around with defaults.. Linux is no longer just a programmer's system, but an end-user system. Not every one would like to spend hours trying to figure out why something has changed since their last upgrade... the sooner the linux developers realize this, the better.

Mallelatheertham Waterfalls - Paradise on Earth

After last week's trip to Ethipothala, I could not wait to go on another trip, and this time it was Srisailam's turn. Although I was itching for a bike ride to Srisailam, I could not get my hands on a proper bike to make the trip (My own resembling a bullock cart more than a bike). So my colleague, Chandra, and I decided to go to Srisailam on a cab. We started inviting friends and soon the number grew to 10 people. So we took a Qualis and my friend Raja's Maruti 800.

We started at 7AM on saturday, and picked up our friend AJ, who was visiting Hyd at Afzal Gunj. It was around 11:30 by the time we reached the Srisailam Dam, it was beautiful, but unfortunately there were no gates open, unlike NagarjunaSagar last week - which disappointed us a bit. But the view was impressive with the river Krishna snaking across the valley. After waiting for sometime, we had Lunch and visited Sikhara Darshanam (literally translated, it means view from the mountain top).

We could not make it to the Safari, since there was little time left, so we headed straight for Mallelatheertham waterfalls. It was 40km from Srisailam dam, on the way back to hyderabad, with a 8km diversion on a mud road. It was almost 3:30PM by the time we reached Mallelatheertam. There were some steps leading to the waterfall in the valley, but we could not see anything due to the dense growth.

After reaching the end of stairs, we saw the waterfall on the left. The waterfall was much smaller than my earlier experiences at Ethipothala or Shivanasamudram (especially the latter). But the scene was very beautiful. With water falling from a very high, almost vertical rock face into the green pond below, and trees all around, It was like paradise on earth. If God gave me a real estate contract to develop a new paradise, I would definitely start with this place!

We were able to get on to the base rock of the waterfall, beyond which is the pond. Getting on the rocks was very tricky since they were covered with extremely slippery moss everywhere, except at places with the most water flow. We made it under the falls and the water was hitting us like small stones. We had to cover our ears since they were the most sensitive part of the body with our backs turned to the falls.

After staying for about an hour under the falls we started back the long ride to hyderabad, and it was almost 11:30 PM by the time we reached home, But the waterfall was the highlight of the entire trip. Smaller than most popular falls but no less exciting, overall the experience was unforgettable. More pics are available here.

Financial Weapons of Mass Destruction - Credit Default Swaps

While Bush was busy searching for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, he neglected to bother about the ones that were being "stockpiled" in his own country. No we are not talking about warheads, but Credit Default Swaps - or "Financial Weapons of Mass Destruction" as Warren Buffet, the most successful investor in the world, likes to call them. Now that they blew up in America's face, leaving the country in recession, and spreading the fallout across the world, we will try to see what these things were about.

So what exactly are these credit default swaps? Lets say Bank X loans a large sum to a lets say Tom for mortgage. There is a chance that Tom might not be able to repay his mortgage. In that case, the bank stands to lose the money loaned - which is a major risk for it. So to offset the risk the bank enters into a Credit Default Swap contract with a counter party. Bank X then starts paying fixed payments to the counterparty. In turn, the counterparty assumes all risk of the person defaulting on the loan itself. Although this looks like a typical exchange, the rotten part of it is simply that - the seller of the contract does not need to have any real assets to make the contract.. and can technically go bankrupt.

So a credit default swap makes everyone happy - as long as Tom is making his payments. For Bank X, it kept a huge amount of default risk off its books, and for the counterparty, it is pure money for nothing. But once Tom does not pay his mortgage payment, as it happened, then the system begins to unravel... Bank X demands money from the counterparty, who might go bankrupt since he does not have enough assets to make good his promise. The counterparty is also unable to raise the cash, as the house value would have fallen in the market. So it declares bankruptcy. Immediately, the huge losses starts to appear on the books of Bank X... which takes everyone by surprise, since it was not "expected".

The market for Credit Default Swaps is Over-The-Counter, and not regulated well. In some instances big firms used to buy CDS contracts from little known players, who declared bankruptcy once the defaults started piling up, forcing many big firms to become insolvent. The notional value of the CDS market grew from a couple of hundred billion dollars at the end of 2000 into more than $40 trillion by 2005.

This is one of the reasons for the US Govt trying to bailout firms. Since if they have lots of CDS contracts, then shutting them down would force some other company to take huge debts onto its books immediately, and itself become insolvent, starting a chain reaction. The govt hopes that this will in the meantime allow the values of the assets to grow slowly, and reduce the impact on the firms.

Windows and the hardcore Linux user

Being a hardcore Linux user is not easy, if you are forced to use Windows, especially by official decree. When I used to work for Motorola, we used to get only Windows machines, and the closest thing to a Linux machine was a Solaris 8 server. I could not get a Linux machine without any official project requirement. In the current startup where I work, Linux is the defacto standard, so my life is much easier.

Recently as part of a new assignment, I had to use a firmware compiler, which unfortunately runs only on windows. So I started installing windows on another machine. After installing XP (after a couple of BSoDs and reinstalls tending from heavy infections), I tried to download the compiler software, and I found out that the network card driver was not installed. I was totally pissed off, and then I remembered that I had a Fedora 9 Boot CD, which made the situation akin to someone asking Salman Khan to remove his shirt, or Deve gowda to take a nap... I immediately installed Linux on the machine, and once it is done, booted into linux and figured out the type of hardware from lspci. I started downloading windows drivers for the network card, and it took me quite a while to get proper network drivers.

It made me realize that I have become addicted to Linux... which although does not have a support group like Linux Addicts Anonymous, is a serious impairment for someone living in Bill Gates's Paradise. Ever since I started using only Linux, both in office and on my personal desktop and laptop, my patience for waiting for stuff to happen was gradually thinning all the time. I became a crazed maniac asking for lower response times to actions - until now. Now that I have to use Windows atleast once in a day, I am back to being more patient waiting for my computer to respond, or taking care of it like a loving father while it throws tantrums like a BSoD or plain stops responding to my pleas or gets sick. Guess with due effort, I can become a WindowsXP certified user soon enough. However to become a Windows Vista certified user, I think I would need a prescription medication like Prozac.

P.S: I am not a Linux Fan, just a user. If there is anything I am a fan of, it would be the Windows OS from a shareholder standpoint.

Ethipothala Waterfalls - The hidden beauty

It has been over a month since my last vacation at Shivanasamudram, and I was itching for some action. My friend and I decided to go to Nagarjuna Sagar, along with some of our colleagues. I was not too excited about this trip, since I have been to Nagarjuna Sagar more than 4 times before, including once on a bike. Little did I know that this trip would be an experience I wont forget anytime soon!

We took a Qualis, and started late at 8:30 AM from the City. It was almost 11:30 by the time we reached NagarjunaSagar. There were 2 gates open on the dam, which was spectacular. After roaming around at the foot of the dam for an hour, we had our lunch. Unfortunately we realized that the last Ferry to Nagarjuna Konda, an island in the man made lake, leaves at 1:30 leaving no time to catch it. So we decided to go to Ethipotahala waterfalls, about 15 km from the dam.

I have never been to the foot of this waterfall since I were never aware of any path leading there, and due to the warning signs about crocodiles everywhere, we did not venture closeby earlier. However this time a little kid approached us and said that he could take us to the foot of the falls. Initially Raja and Chandra went with the boy, while we stayed back not too excited about it. But they came back and told us that it was a must-see. So we too joined them, and the path was filled with crossing steams with moss covered rocks, making the mini trek very tricky. After about 30 minutes we reached the foot of the waterfall and it was beautiful. The waterfalls falls were filled with water due to the recent monsoon. The scenes were breathtaking. There were huge stones in front of the waterfalls on which we sat, only a couple of meters from the waterfall, with the water spraying on our faces. It was truly breathtaking! We stayed there till 5 PM awed by its beauty. However since this is in a valley, it gets darker much before sunset, so we rushed out of there by going through the same path, which somehow felt little easier on the way back.

We started the long journey back home at 6PM. I had a raging headache at that time. But overall I knew that this was one trip which was well worth it. Some of the pics are available here.

Pay your Electric Bill online (in AP)

Tired of going to the E-Seva center and waiting in Q for 30 mins or so to pay an electric bill? Well if you have a Citibank account, you can pay your electric bill without any additional charge. If not anyone can pay their bills at esevaonline. None of this requires you to leave the computer at all. I am mentioning this since many of my friends indicated that you need to register before you can pay your bills online, but that is NOT the case.

To actually pay the bill in Citibank, you need to enter the information given in the bill itself in the form presented in the Pay Utility bills online section. And Citibank transfers the amount to APCPDCL without any additional charge. The only problem with this is that there is no feedback indicating that the bill was successfully paid.

If you are out of city or country, then you can use the website esevaonline.com. Register yourself and create an entry for your electric bill. Then you can check the bill amount online, and pay it through that website itself, or you can login to citibank and pay the bill there. Although I haven't paid the amount using the esevaonline website, I believe it should be reliable.

Dollar in the dump

The massive bailout of the financial sector, valued at nearly $1 trillion, is causing a record deficit, which is sinking the dollar. Already investors have started moving away from dollar into commodities. Commodities across the board like Gold, Oil, Copper etc are seeing a massive rally. (Oil price increased by almost $35 to $130, and is expected to go up.) The details of the bailout have also not emerged completely, leading to volatility, which is only expected to get worse.

Dollar's position as a reserve currency will be challenged if the slide continues. China has billions of US dollars in reserves, so if it sees that the dollar value is dropping, it may start dumping its dollar assets in favor of other more resilient assets. Other countries also have substantial dollar reserves. This would release a lot of dollars into the global markets putting much more downward pressure on the dollar. The only reason against that happening now, is that the Euro, the nearest alternative, is also in a pretty bad shape.

To control the drop in dollar, the government has to reduce the deficit. One way is to reduce expenditure, which appears to be nearly impossible due to the bailout plans of Paulson. The other alternative is to increase taxes, which is equally unlikely. A weak dollar will cause much harm to the economy and raise inflation, leading to a very damaging recession.

A positive effect of a weak dollar is that it will increase exports, and make imports more costlier. But this is a long term effect, which wont necessarily kick in, in the short run.

The current bailout, as bad as it is, is the only way to offset much bigger crisis in the American economy. But the loss of confidence in the dollar will take a long time to recover.

TCP Offload Engine support in Linux

TCP Offload Engines (TOE) are customized hardware which handle TCP connections completely in the network card itself, instead of in the kernel. Lately 10Gbps Ethernet cards are becoming the industry standard in the high end server market. A simple rule of thumb regarding TCP processing in the CPU requires 1 HZ of CPU for every 1 bit of TCP data handled per second. This means that a 10GigE card, requiring 10 GHz, can quickly eat the CPU like there is no tomorrow. Even with multiple CPUs and multiple cores per CPU, the impact is significant.

Added to this, IEEE standards are already being prepared for 40Gbps and 100Gbps Ethernet. So in this situation, using TOE becomes inevitable. There are already many TCP functions already being done in hardware like checksumming, LRO (Large Receive offload), LSO (Large Send Offload) etc. But a TOE provides a complete end-to-end solution.

TCP Offload Engines were never a hit with the linux networking community. Linux Kernel Maintainers, esp David Miller, have been against the idea of TOE due to various valid reasons like it reduces maintainability of code, etc. Also the kernel maintainers argue that TOE was only a stopgap solution, before CPU speeds caught up with the loads, citing cases in the past where TOE was implemented even for 100Mbps links. More details about their position can be found in this article - Linux and TCP Offload Engines. This has caused a situation where the 10GigE vendors like Chelsio are forced to maintain the TOE patches to the Linux kernel, out-of-tree. This causes the code to be inherently unstable.

Anyway, the end users do not face any loss of functionality since the vendor provided patches to the Linux kernel can be used to build kernel modules, which provide support for TOE hardware in Linux machines. This is what I like about Open Source. You do not have to be bound by what others think. You leave that decision to time.

Republican VP Sarah Palin's Yahoo! mail hacked

Two days ago, the email account of Ms. Sarah Palin, the current Governor of Alaska, as well as the Republican Vice Presidential Candidate's Yahoo! Email account - gov.sarah@yahoo.com was hacked. The nature of the hack is the well known "forgotten password" of Yahoo! link, which asks for some personal information before generating a new password. For a public figure like Palin, most of this information is not really private... which means the existing security measures need to be looked at in a different light. Even for normal ppl, the information is not too difficult to get, except that there are easier ways like keyboard logging, social engineering etc.

Most services on the web try to escape this predicament, by giving the option of mailing your new password to your email address. But alas this cannot work email accounts itself. It is important that this issue be addressed by Yahoo! and other webmail providers, since there are many people who lose information through such loopholes.

On your end, to reduce the possibility of such attacks, you should give fake information for such email accounts to prevent public information on the website. And you don't have to give the real name of your pet either! And for the love of God, remember that information, since if you forget that, no one is helping you out.

The complete log of emails and information used to hack the account is available at the Wikileaks website.

A Wednesday - An Exciting Thriller

Generally I have a low opinion of the average run of the mill movies which get released by Bollywood or the other Tollywoods. They generally run on a hackneyed, beaten-to-death formula. But a few of them are gems. "A Wednesday" by Neeraj Pandey is one. It is a gripping thriller about a wednesday when a series of incidents changes the lives of all those involved.

The movie starts with a phone call to the police commissioner of Mumbai (played by Anupam Kher), about 5 bombs placed at various locations in Mumbai. The caller (Naseerudeen Shah) gives extremely detailed instructions about how to release known terrorists. From then onwards, the movie progresses into a gripping thriller, with many twists and turns to a very satisfying conclusion. The tempo of the film is maintained till the end, which is very rare. Most movies lose their tempo after a good start, but not this one. A definite must watch.

Five Stars any day...

Socialism for the Super Rich - Moral Hazards in US economy

The recent bailout of Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae and AIG, by the US Govt to protect the faith in US markets has created a moral hazard. A moral hazard indicates that while you take a risk, the profits from it go exclusively to you, but losses are distributed to parties which do not have anything to do with the deal. This creates a situation which rewards an overtly risky behavior.

The US taxpayers are paying for the mistakes of a few who tried to make a lot of money in the US real estate and mortgage businesses. The Fed by arranging the shotgun marriage of Bear Sterns to JP Morgan a couple of months ago, while assuring at least $30 billion against losses from Bear's trades, indirectly rewarded the overtly risky behavior, by letting the taxpayers buttress the downside of the risks. Freddie and Fannie losses could potentially run into hundreds of billions of dollars. The Fed tried to take a stand by not bailing out Lehman, but the odds were stacked against its favor as the AIG posed a huge counterparty risk to all the financial markets. In the end, the AIG bailout cost the taxpayers $85 billion.

This is not new for the Fed. It arranged the cleaner disposal of Long Term Capital Management (LTCM) Hedge fund after it blew up in 1998, since the fund with $10 billion in deposits and controlling over $1 trillion of the economy through leverage would have brought down the entire global economy.

Moral Hazards have always existed in the world of Hedge funds, where the fund managers gets to take home a large part of any profits he makes. Losses would typically result in him getting fired, but without any monetary damage. This caused the Hedge fund managers to take up increasingly risky trades. Mutual funds were somewhat safer due to strict regulation which limited the riskiness of trades they undertook.

In a free market enterprise the Fed has to let these institutions fail for their mistakes. But they would also cause global economic collapse and cause a lot of harm to the common man. So this is amounting to near blackmail by these firms (a more apt term would be brinkmanship).

Other than the explicit bailouts of Freddie, Bear, AIG etc, The Fed is also implicitly bailing out the other firms by keeping the interest rates extremely low, at a time when inflation is eating into the savings of the common folk.

So who is at fault? The fault is the lack of proper regulation and laws governing Investment banks and financial institutions in general. For example the repeal of the Glass-Steagall act is one such action, which increased the moral hazard since banks can also do investment actions and lose lots of money rendering them insolvent. This would cause the FDIC to dole out money to the depositors from tax payers if the banks fail. This is definitely not the best solution, but can be one solution which can be used to reduce this moral hazard, which if ignored further would result in increasingly worse depressions, as traders start taking increasingly risky trades.

Although it is against the spirit of free markets, the US Govt must be more proactive in analyzing the markets and bring in relevant laws and regulation, instead of waiting for the storm, to pass new laws.

Tunneling to the inside - using SSH

Many networks are setup in such a way that you can access a machine (lets say GGG) in the network through SSH and then you can access any other machine (lets say XXX) in that network using protocols like SSH, telnet, samba etc. But wouldn't it be great to access those services right from the machine (lets say LLL) you are sitting at itself?

Enter the SSH Tunnel. SSH tunnel could be used to create an end to end SSH connection between the local machine (LLL) and the gateway machine (GGG). Then you can access any machine (XXX) from (LLL) itself. The best part is you do not have to be root for this!

First establish the SSH tunnel connection between GGG and LLL using the following command on LLL

ssh user@GGG -L 2000:XXX:22 -N

where, 2000 is the local port on LLL which will act as
       a gateway (this can be any port you want)
22 is the remote port on the machine XXX to which you 
       want to connect to (For example this will be 23
       for telnet, 139 for SMB, 22 for SSH etc)

Now your tunnel is setup. Just connect to the machine by connecting to LLL on port 2000 - you will be automatically forwarded to connect to 22 on XXX machine!

The Bursting Oil Bubble - Aftermath

The Oil bubble has more or less burst for now as expected. with the price of crude down to nearly $94 from the peak of $147 in July. The main reason for the decline is that the US Dollar is once again stronger than earlier. Since Crude is priced in dollars, any fall in dollar value will increase the dollar price of crude and vice versa. Oil is one of the main commodities that is also used as hedge against the dollar, and now that the dollar is doing good, Oil is getting dumped in favor of US Treasuries and the like. The price of Oil is expected to drop further, since the Lehman bankruptcy will possibly unwind some Oil trades.

The global economic downturn is also playing its part, by reducing the demand for Oil. The last time the world economy was down after the 1997 East Asian crisis etc, Oil fell to under $10 a barrel. The cracks in the OPEC are once again out in the open, with Saudi Arabia not wanting to reduce its production. Politically also, the fall in Oil price is significant with the tide turning away from the Oil producers - especially the politically active ones like Russia.

The presumed demand from rising economies like India and China causing a global upward price spiral proved to be unfounded at least in the short run. And it also showed that however inelastic the price demand curve of oil is, there is still a curve there which causes unrealistic prices to throttle demand. Airlines can once again breathe easily.

Now-a-days, none of the bad news is really affecting the crude price slide very much. News such as Hurricane Ike likely to impede Oil production in the Gulf of Mexico, increased terrorist activity in Nigeria or likewise, which would have caused massive rallies earlier, are causing no more than a whimper, and the price slide stops temporarily before resuming its journey down to a more realistic value.

On the negative side, the push for alternatives to oil is once again reducing, indicating the short sighted nature of the public. Also the reduction of premium on Oil, removes the financial incentive for private investors to pursue alternative renewable fuels. Oil has also stopped being a major campaign issue. This is high time the coming Govt in Washington takes a stand and pumps money into the research for alternative fuels, instead of bailing out companies like the Detroit Big Three to prop up the economy in the short run.

The dent made by the spike of oil prices, made the American consumer more aware of the risks of owning a gas guzzler. It will be a while before this harsh lesson is forgot, which is good news.

The American consumers at the Pump still see Oil at more than $4 since Hurricane Ike destroyed the refining capacity on the east coast, resulting in serious Oil shortages. But this is a temporary phenomenon which should pass in a week or so.

I really applaud the Indian govt's decision to NOT reduce the price of Oil at the pump, even though it is the election year. This goes a long way in reducing the oil subsidy to more manageable levels, and will leave the image of India as a good investment destination intact.

Nightmare on Wall St - Failures of Lehman, Merryl, AIG, WaMu....

In The Simpsons Movie, when Bart Simpson, utterly embarrassed by a situation, moans - "This is the worst day of my life!", his father replies - "This is the worst day of your life, SO FAR". The same could be said about the happenings in the last week of the US Financial sector.

What a week it was. just when you were thinking that the worst was over, the financial sector keeps hitting new lows. Couple of months back Bear Sterns was taken over by JP Morgan in a Shotgun wedding arranged by The Fed. Markets were a bit stable, and now it spread like wildfire in the last week. These are a couple of things which went bad in the financial sector in the last week.

- Freddie Mac & Fannic Mae were nationalized
- Lehman Brothers stock in free fall resulting in its declaring Chapter 11 bankruptcy
- Merryl Lynch bought over by Bank of America, after a free fall in its stock
- AIG group stock going down, resulting in its "restructuring"
- Washington Mutual (WaMu) Bank's stock tumbling
- Wachovia Bank's stock nose diving

So now out of the big Five wall street investment firms, only two - Goldman Sachs & JP Morgan were left standing. This extreme uncertainty in the financial sector trashed the DowJones, making it face the worst percentage fall in 6 years.

The ticking timebomb here is that the investment firms make a lot of trades with one another. Since there are a very few big firms taking up both sides of most of the trades, the trades suffer from counterparty risk. i.e. if you make a trade which realized a profit on the books, but the counterparty to the trade cannot pay up since it went bankrupt, then you lose too since you wont be seeing any real money from them. Now that Lehman has gone down, all the trades done with it need to be unwound, or a loss taken. When these losses start appearing on the books of other investment firms, they too will start taking a hit.

Lehman's is the biggest bankruptcy filing ever with $639 billion in assets. So there are bound to be repercussions everywhere in the financial sector. UK regulators have already asked firms to declare their exposure to Lehman. Citi group looks like it has a serious exposure to Lehman, which if it did, would seriously undermine its current precarious position.

Already there is a talk of a further rate cut by the Fed, which, at current inflation levels, can only be bad.

So is the rock bottom hit? is this the worst? I cant help thinking of the answer given to Bart Simpson...

Continue Browsing during Power failures

Power cuts (or load shedding, black outs, or however you want to call them) are very frequent and frustrating here in hyderabad. Other times we face the low voltage situations (also called the brownout). In such cases I would be able to continue using my laptop (given that its a 9 cell Thinkpad), but lets face it - Very little work of value (or timepass, as my friends like to call it) gets done without the INTERNET! It is even more frustrating when you tend to work from home, and you are cutoff due to power loss and have to rush to office.

The best way to beat this situation is to bring out the old UPS you used for your old desktop. Even if u never had a UPS, you can buy a cheap one for less than Rs 1500/-. Once you connect your modem and wireless router through the UPS, you will get a backup of almost 2 hours straight. However if you are using Sify or other ISPs which given you a direct ethernet cable to your house you might be out of luck, since the local hub at your operator will lose power. This was one more reason for me to switch from Sify Broadband to Airtel, other than Sify's pathetic customer care and reliability issues (15 days of no internet in a month makes you go crazy!).

Also, if you are watching a movie with friends and power goes out, you can connect the speaker set to the UPS, to get the enhanced volume. Or in emergencies you can charge your cell phone on it too.

Converting AVI/MPG to 3GP files in Linux

The best way to convert an AVI/MPG video file to 3GP (like for viewing them on your cellphone) is to use the opensource program - ffmpeg. The ffmpeg was also the starting point for the most famous movie player for linux - the mplayer suite.

To start using ffmpeg, First download the latest ffmpeg source code. Run configure on it using the following command line, followed by a make and make install.

./configure --enable-nonfree --enable-gpl --enable-libamr-wb --enable-libamr-nb
 --enable-libmp3lame

If you do not have the libamr-wb and libamr-nb codecs installed, download the following packages - amr-nb-7.0.0.2 and amr-wb-7.0.0.3 - and configure, compile and install them. The description of these packages is given in detail here.

NOTE that if you have FFmpeg installed, you need to make sure that you see both --enable-libamr-wb and --enable-libamr-nb in the configuration. You can check the configuration of ffmpeg by running ffmpeg > /dev/null.

Then run the following command to convert the AVI/MPG files to 3GP

ffmpeg -i inputfile.mpg -s 176x144 -b 300k -r 10   -ar 8000 -ab 12.2k 
-ac 1 -f 3gp -aspect 4:3 outputfile.3gp

Upload to your cell, and it will help you get over lots of boring times :)

End of Credit Crisis in Sight - Freddie Mac & Fannie Mae nationalized

The Credit crisis which has roiled the markets for over 2 years is now hopefully nearing an End with the near-nationalization of the US Secondary Mortgage Market Majors - Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, yesterday. This action has fed a lot more confidence into the credit markets reeling from the subprime crisis.

The US mortgage market is structured in such a way that, you have the primary lenders (banks like Wells Fargo etc) who make loans to individuals for the purpose of housing. However, these mortgages run into hundreds of thousands of dollars. So a normal lender can only give so many mortgages, before his cash flow is completely stuck in these extremely long-term (upto 30 year long) loans. So to add more liquidity to such a market, the US Govt established the Freddie Mac in c1970, which would buy the loans (at its discretion) from these primary lenders. Having got back their initial capital, the primary lenders can provide other people loans. Freddie Mac in turn pooled and securitized (oversimplification:bundled) these loans and sold the resulting securities to investors in various organizations. Freddie Mac, guaranteed the rate of interest on these securities and hence assumed the credit risk, for which it charged a fee. Essentially, this means that any non-payment of mortgage by a person, will be made good by Freddie Mac. Fannie Mae is also essentially similar, except for its beginnings. Between themselves, these organizations own over 50% of all home loans in the US.

Technically these organizations were supposed to be Government Sponsored Enterprises, but essentially private corporations owned by stock holders, without any Govt insurance for their loans. However, due to their size and presumed US Govt backing, they had acquired the tag of "Too big to fail", as in, if they fail, they would drag down the economy with them. This caused them to take up riskier mortgages from the primary lenders. At last count, Both Freddie and Fannie had over $12 Trillion exposure to the mortgage market.

Now that the Subprime crisis has precipitated a downturn in the US housing market, this downturn has resulted in a lot of mortgage defaults (although Freddie Mac does not buy subprime loans), which caused Freddie & Fannie to declare losses of nearly $15 billion last year. This has led to their credit rating dropping to Junk status, forcing the premium on loans to them (bonds) going over 2.5%, making it very difficult for them to raise much needed new capital.

To alleviate the crisis, the US Congress in July passed a law, with bi-partisan support, allowing the US Govt to step in and bail out these corporations if required. This was supposed to give confidence to potential lenders that their loans to Freddie would not go bad (thereby reducing the risk and hence premiums on the bonds). But this action backfired badly, since people know that any such nationalization would wipe out Freddie's stock value. This caused its share price to plummet to less than $5. This precipitated a crisis, forcing the Govt to act immediately and nationalize them both. As expected, Freddie Mac shares dropped to less than 25 cents.

So now the US taxpayers are "bailing" out these corporations. The impact of the bailout is not completely known, and is supposed to be in tens of billions of dollars, if not hundreds of billions. This will also cause tighter regulation in the housing markets, with people having even prime credit ratings facing difficulty to make a mortgage. The US treasury bills have also dropped.

On the brighter side, however, markets are very optimistic over the measure since the credit markets will now be more liquid, stock of various banks which gave loans to Freddie (like Citi Group) have gone up a lot, the premiums have also dropped on mortgages. The last one will once again hopefully rejuvenate the housing sector, which makes up over 25% of the US economy. So overall the housing sector can recover from the glut of unsold inventory, and once again start growing. These will also help to reduce the effects of the current recession the US economy is undergoing.

MPlayer - Overcoming in-built low volumes of media files

Many times, the AVI files of movies end up with a very low audio volume causing a lot of pain for use with laptop speakers (esp like ThinkPad), which do not have a very wide range of volumes like headphones or traditional speakers. To overcome this issue, many media players provide an option to increase the volume more than 100% (upto 400% in case of VLC Media player).

After googling and RTFMing for a while I figured out that the way to do this in MPlayer is to use a software volume mixer instead of the soundcard's mixer. You can run mplayer with the following additional options

mplayer -softvol -softvol-max 400 

The 400 indicates that you want to increase the output by upto 400% of the base volume indicated in the media file.

This link has more information on using an audio filter instead of using a software volume mixer to do the same. Happy movie watching!!

Ripping DVDs into AVI files

Ripping DVDs in Linux using mencoder is tricky business. No doubt mencoder is the most powerful tool at your disposal with a wide variety of options to convert practically from any format to any format. This in turn also becomes its disadvantage - there are too many options, which an ordinary user cannot understand. There were nearly a 1000 options out there, with a variety of combinations between them, most of which keep taking about stuff like deinterlacing, quantization and key frames.

After trying a number of times to rip DVDs unsuccessfully in Linux, I recently struck gold, while googling, in a discussion forum on how to do this correctly. This is the command that worked flawlessly for me

/usr/bin/mencoder -vf harddup -vf-add 
 smartblur=.6:-.5:0,unsharp=l5x5:.8:c5x5:.4
 -vf scale=480:360 -xvidencopts 
 bitrate=900:profile=dxnhtntsc -lameopts
 cbr:br=128:aq=0:vol=1 -oac mp3lame
 -ovc xvid -o outfile.avi *.vob

The scale= could be used to set the new size of the AVI file. Lesser sizes will result in lesser space. The bitrate= also controls the quality of the movie generated, and is inversely related to the size of the generated AVI file.

Download the mencoder (located in the mplayer package) from some default distribution (I used yum to get it), so that most of the required options are compiled in.

Google Chrome - A New Era

Recently I heard about this new browser from Google called Google Chrome, which will be available in (Surprise! Surprise!) Beta version. The Google guys, true to the innovative streak, made a comic, justifying yet another entry into the world of browsers, already filled up with heavy weights like IE, firefox etc. However after going through the feature list, I was realized that this was not just another browser. It's design was more closer technically to an Operating System, than to a browser.

There is a fundamental paradigm shift happening here. The browser is the new Operating System. We have already seen a ton of web applications, like Spreadsheet, presentation apps etc, most of which were thought to be almost impossible to run in a browser.

Microsoft with its Windows, is entrenched in the Desktop OS market. I do not see any operating system which can challenge its dominance there. But Google has, instead of taking it head-on, is completely circumventing the Operating System, making it as just another commodity. More than 20 years ago, IBM thought that hardware was the key and the operating system did not matter too much. Microsoft came and commoditized the underlying hardware, and things were never the same again.

I see the same thing happening now, with Google commoditizing the Operating System market. Beyond a point, people will stop caring about what OS their machine is running anymore than people now care about what BIOS their machine is running. (Just to complete the analogy, IBM made the mistake of not doing an exclusive license of DOS, which sealed its fate. Microsoft's mistake happened almost 9 years ago with the introduction of the XMLHttpRequest)

A New Era has begun. If Google can pull off this browser thing decently, then history will definitely repeat itself.

Shivanasamudra Trip

Recently South India was seeing a very strong monsoon. This made all the water falls in the western ghats much more beautiful. So my friends and myself decided to visit some waterfalls near Bangalore. We could not go for the Jog falls, India's highest water falls, since visiting them would entail a journey of over 6 hrs, which would be difficult in a 2 day visit. So we decided to go for Shivanasamudra waterfalls.

Praveen and myself started on Friday evening by train to bangalore. The Kacheguda railway station was marked by heavy security with sniffer dogs and metal detectors. But nevertheless instead of making us feel better, we felt more conscious of the fact that we are potential targets. But I digress.. After boarding the train and getting down at bangalore, Our friends AJ and Balaji picked us up in a Chevrolet Tavera at 7:00AM and we were off to sivasamudram.

Initially we went to one place where we could see the waterfalls. The waterfalls were in full force owning to the monsoon. We took a lot of pictures and then climbed down the hill to come closer to the water. We arrived at the banks, but the water was flowing at a very furious pace, and we could not actually get into the water, since a slip might earn us a ticket across the waterfall. After spending some time taking pictures we set off to another place at the base of the waterfall.

In this place, to reach the river, we had to climb down a lot of steps. The water was relatively much calmer, but still flowing fast. We got down into the water and lazed around for about 2 hours. The water was not too cold, and we were able to enjoy by sitting on the riverbed which was hardly 2 feet deep. There were a lot of people, but the excellent weather and the beautiful river with its waterfall backdrop made it more than worth it.

After getting out of water we had hot chilli bajji, and then started climbing up the steps, which was a drag. Then we headed back to bangalore, and after getting stuck in the traffic for a very long time, we reached home at around 8PM.

On Sunday we went GoKarting at Torq03 at E-Zone in Marthalli. The karts were in excellent condition, although it was pricey at Rs 150/- for 6 laps. We went on 18 laps total, and the track was also very nicely designed. The karts were skidding nicely too, which helped us go extra fast. Overall it was a very enjoyable trip.

The Afghan - Review

I had been a very close follower of the global terrorism scene long before even 9/11 happened. I still remember the days while watching "The World This Week" program on TV, showing the Taliban tanks rolling into Kabul in 1996. I also could not forget the day Ahmad Shah Massoud, the Afghan Nothern Alliance warlord, was assassinated on Sept 9th 2001, two days before 9/11. I still vividly recall thinking "this is very bad". For someone who follows terrorism so closely, I was extremely happy when I could get my hands on a copy of The Afghan by Frederick Forsyth.The novel was very gripping, and is styled like a documentary. It given a very interesting bird's eye view into the global war on terror, not to mention giving glimpses of the Soviet-Afghan war, the resulting Civil War and the NATO Invasion post 9/11.

The Afghan starts out with the MI5 and CIA getting a lead about something major being cooked up by "The Sheik" (as Osama Bin Laden is reportedly called), and then it proceeds into a gripping tale about the guts of a terrorist operation, styled on the lines of the USS Cole Incident - only on a much grander scale. The CIA & MI5 try to infiltrate the Al Queda using a SAS operative. The novel is very well laid out, albeit for one minor sequence of events where a Fighter Jet crashes into a log cabin in the woods, setting free a prisinor in highly improbable circumstances. Other than this one incident, the entire novel was very good. Four Stars!

SFO-Hyd on Jet Airways

I had taken the Jet Airways itinerary for flying from Hyd to SFO and back. Jet's level of service was pretty impressive, especially so since I was flying on the Boeing 777-300. The service was good. The economy class seats with the big LCD screens were even better.

However for someone flying from Hyderabad, by taking a Domestic Jet Flight between Hyd and Mumbai, the itinerary, especially the return journey part, is pathetic. I would say this is mainly due to the long and unnecessary stopover in Mumbai lasting about 9 hours. The worst part was that after alighting the SFO-BOM flight, a 22 hour journey, The domestic transit passengers were forced to wait standing for 3 hours for a combination of collecting luggage, customs, domestic terminal transfer etc. Then it was a wait for 6 hours at the domestic terminal. I could rant about the airport's "services" - like water dripping on people INSIDE the airport, but it would not be anything new for someone who used Indian airports.

Overall, although I hate to say this, this itinerary was the worst even though Jet Airlines was very good. I would prefer waiting a much longer time in Singapore airport while flying singapore airlines any day, than deal with the shitty Mumbai airport on any airlines. For someone flying out of Mumbai though, this is one of the best options they have got.

The new bubble - Oil

Most people here in India, do not know whats going on with Oil Prices. All they know is that their Petrol costs 10% more. And they are pissed off. Driving 20 miles daily on my Bike, I am too. But the distubing part is that - the Indian govt flush with the recent huge tax revenue increases and under the influence of the coming national elections in 2009, has blatantly increased the Oil Subsidy - causing huge long term problems for the Indian economy, and will result in downgrading of its Investment grade rating.

Anyway, this article tries to focus on the reason why Oil prices are increasing on a global scale. What most people do not get is simply this - If the oil demand and supply have not changed, then the simple law of demand and supply should dictate at most a marginal increase in prices to account for inflation maybe. But why are we seeing a 350% increase in under 4 years? Its not like the demand jumped suddenly, or the supply got throttled. (For all those who believe that emerging economies are contributing to the demand increase, note that both china and India consume only a fraction of the world's Oil supply. In fact, in face of the rise in prices, demand has come down multiple percentage points.)

The main problem here is the rampart speculation in the Oil Futures market. Money from Institutional Investors (like Hedge funds) needs to be invested in areas which give good returns. Until the 2001 recession, it was the technology firms, which resulted in the the dotcom bubble and the subsequent slowdown. That money shifted to the next best thing - Real Estate. But when real estate did not give the required returns, the Sub Prime mortgage market with its high risk, high returns profile was tapped, eventually resulting in the Subprime Crisis, which has still not completely blow over. Now the money is looking for a new place to be invested - and Oil is the answer.

So when the amount of money put into the futures market increases 31 fold from $9 billion to $280 billion in 8 years, you know where the problem is coming from. Too much money, giving an illusion of demand.

So what happens next? My guess is as soon as the rate of returns starts to slow down (when the most basic law of economics catches up), money start flowing out to the next area which gets a high rate of return. This will result in a slump in the Oil prices, back to the $80 a barrel level. Unfortunately though, this market is slightly unlike others, in that Oil has a very inelastic demand curve. But with the current prices, the demand will go down, eventually leaving many casualties like the Oil suppliers. (The last time this happened after 1970s Oil crisis - the 8 year Iran-Iraq war broke out, followed by the 1991 Gulf war)

The only silver lining is that - hopefully this crisis will bring to the fore the alternative fuel technologies. But if the US Govt behaves in a shortsighted way, like it did after the 1970s oil crisis, then we set the stage open for another bubble in the future.

Why I hate Indian movies - The Formula

Yesterday, I was able to watch the movie Dasavataram. Kamal was at his usual best. The 10 roles he played were in some form and degree related to the ten avataras taken by Vishu in Hindu mythology. The movie had a couple of mass elements in it. Although they were necessary to make it palatable to the masses, it is a pity that the movie had to stoop to those levels. It had potential. I know that to make any amount of money back, it has to do it. Every big budget movie that gets made in India has to follow the "formula" - a derogatory term for standard fare with different packaging - different people, same formula.

Lets see the formula for most telugu movies
- one or two mass songs (read as songs with busty babe(s))
- four or five fighting sequences (hero kicking ass)
- couple of sentimental scenes (hero feeling senti)
- hero is invincible, villan is evil
- Feel good factor

Although most hollywood big budgets are mostly mindless action packed fares, Sometimes you get to see some really good movies (Syriana comes to mind), played by good actors. There is a uniqueness to most movies. This is seriously missing with the typical Indian fare.

Another scourge of the Indian cinema is the "image". For an actor in the Indian industry, image is everything. A hero is a hero - he should be invincible in every movie... For the Indian movies, the word "protagonist" can be used interchangeably with the word, "hero". So most good actors do not get to do any roles other than those they have the "image" for. And those roles are always the macho man roles, because others carry the liability of at best addressing only a part of the market, and at worst destroying the image - rendering him "untouchable" in a bad way.

With respect to Indian movies, I see a beacon of hope in the Parallel cinema revolution that has arrived in Bollywood. These movies are sustained by the spreading multiplex culture in the Indian metros. But south Indian movie industry still has a long way to go, before big actors start acting in good movies.

T61 - The Thinkpad Chronicles Part II

There are some things, you never expect would happen, but they do anyway, leaving you spellbound...

The fingerprint reader on my Thinkpad is one such thing. I have never expected that it would have a proper driver in Linux at all, leave alone be of any proper use. It all changed after I found out about the thinkfinger package. After installing the package and editing some files thanks to www.thinkwiki.org, I ran "su -" and got this prompt - "Password or swipe finger:". It blew me away... Never had I thought that this would happen.

The other surprise was the BlueTooth. I tried to enable bluetooth manually and failed miserably. Then I found out about KBlueTooh. And things were never the same again! I no longer use my cellphone's data cable. I just select files in my phone and do a send via Bluetooth and it immediately starts downloading to my PC. Great!

The next biggest surprize was KPowersave. One I started it, I saw that it had all these fancy options like Hibernate and Sleep. I thought that this is one feature which would never work because you need tons of devices, to work together and go to sleep or wake up across PCI/USB etc buses. Needless to say, They worked like a charm.

For the windows user, the above stuff means nothing. It just works and it always did. But for someone like me who has not kept up with Linux since FC3, this is truly amazing stuff!

The Weather Man

I recently saw this movie called "The Weather Man". The movie is a beautiful piece of art. It stars Nicholas Cage as David Spritz, a successful weather guy, who desperately keeps trying to get his personal life back in order. Cage's character suffers from Low self esteem which is reflected in various scenarios. The movie is a slightly dark comedy, and has a motif of random people on the street throwing fast food at him. The archery theme is also very well done. It has pearls of wisdom strewn all over. Some of them seem to be so correct, that it both frightens and enlightens at the same time

- "In Life you will have to chuck some things"

- "When you are young, you have this view of yourself in the future with many positive qualities. With each passing year, the qualities keep on decreasing, until you are left with - yourself."

The End of Outsourcing?

Outsourcing has been a boon for many third world countries. It changed Wealth creation in many fundamental ways in China and India. Many detractors of outsourcing point out that US is losing jobs fast, and is piling on debt due to this globalization of manufacturing. However recent events show that these trends might soon be reversing.

Recent jumps in Crude Oil prices have been pretty disturbing. The $4 oil is cutting into consumer pockets and hence some analysts are predicting that this will push manufacturing of more and more goods to low cost manufacturing destinations like China. But there is something missing in this whole theory. The cost of outsourcing is not constant. Manufactured goods from China have to come to the US in shipping containers, the cost of which have proportionally increased due to the oil price increase. Given a weak dollar, China's rising costs and this added transportation cost - the outsourcing of some class of products might soon be coming to an end. Business week reports that this is already happening with products like batteries etc, which cost a lot to transport.

Coming to the Indian story of IT and IT enabled services outsourcing we are seeing the rapidly increasing wage bill of the Indian outsourcing firms which is cutting into their profits. This is affecting India's ability as the destination of choice for the IT related outsourcing areas.

Although this is a blow to Outsourcing, there is no denying that outsourcing is here to stay. But the outsourcing industry as we know it might soon be gone. The outsourcing bubble would have burst.

Firefox 3 is Here!

FF3 download record is a big hit, albiet notwithout some hiccups with the download servers crashing initially. Already 5 million downloads completed, and still 12 hours to go... Firefox 3 Rocks..

Here is my "certificate" about contributing to the record :)

Compiz Rules

Recently installed Compiz-Fusion on my Thinkpad T61, and it rules... ok ok.. what is compiz-fusion? I would say it is the next best thing since the Linux Kernel itself! It is a 3D window manager which started as Compiz, then it was forked into Beryl, only to be merged back again.

Anyway the effects that are possible with compiz are not just cool, but extremely effective too... Imagine you had 10 windows open, and want to go to the one you need. How many ALT-TABs can you do? now with Compiz, you dont have to do any of that painful stuff...

Detailing the features is difficult, so I will let you watch it yourself in this video I made..

T61 - The Thinkpad Chronicles Part 1

I recently bought a Thinkpad T61 with, god forbid, Vista pre-installed. I thought that I would use my Desktop as the Linux machine, and Vista as the laptop one.

One day into using Vista, I ran into this wierd issue where the packets would go only to machines in the local network. Although I set the gateway etc, and no firewall was installed, the packets refuse to move beyond the gateway. It must have been some wierd "user-friendly" setting I guess. But 3 hours down the lane, no luck.

I thought of installing Linux on it. But the Lenovo guys install one big fat C: and thats it. I have to download partition magic - but again no gateway for that.

So I went ahead and formatted the entire C: broke it into 5 pieces and installed Fedora 8 on it. I was using FC3 earlier, and going by the common "knowledge" about hardware support, I assumed I would have half of my functionality not working in Linux. But that was no reason to take crap from Vista.

After installing Fedora 8, I was totally surprised by how well it was designed and how all the laptop functionality was working. Linux has come a long way in the past few years. I would go to the extent that it is just the perception that remains that using Linux is difficult. But it got so much easier.

If you love Firefox...

Download firefox3 on the first day, and be a part of a new world record... OK that sounded too much like the spam you get daily... But I have been using firefox 3 Beta for 2 weeks and I can say its the best piece of software that I ever used for browsing...

Enough Talk now go to this link and pledge to download firefox3 - http://www.spreadfirefox.com/en-US/worldrecord/ :)

Trip to Yosemite National Park

This weekend Rags, Deepu and Rags Friend Kranthi and myself went on a trip to Yosemite national park. It was a 4hr drive from Bay Area. Yosemite is the first national park in the US established in the 1800s.

We started at 7AM and picked up the others. Around 10PM we saw a beautiful reservoir by the freeway - 152 - the San Luis Reservoir. There was a small side road to it, and we went on it and stopped there. It was very beautiful. However we could not stay for long as that would cut down on the time in Yosemite.

We arrived at the Yosemite Southern entrance from Freeway 41. Just after entering, we saw the Mariposa Grove closed to traffic, and covered with snow. We parked our car there and started walking on the Mariposa Grove for some time. We could not reach the grove itself and turned back after sometime, but it was my first experience with touching snow :)

After that we went to the Yosemite valley. The mountains around were majestic. We also got down by the side of the road and climbed down on rocks, almost 1 km downhill. From there we had a nice view of the waterfalls. Later we went to the Yosemite store in the valley and bought a cake to eat, as there was no other food available :)) Then we stopped by the side of the Merced river, where there was lots of people with grills and other stuff enjoying in the pleasant weather. By 4:00PM we started back by I120. The roads were under construction so we had to stop for almost 15 mins since only one lane was open.

Overall it was a very nice trip. I plan to visit it once again in the future and this time try to make a night stay at Yosemite to explore the valley completely. I have heard that camping here is so popular that they open these camp sites for reservation almost an year in advance, only to have them gobbled up in a few hours.